Manticore Ascendant 1: A Call to Duty (eARC)

by David Weber

“As soon as the SAR teams have made their first sweep, pull everyone who’s handy with power tools and get them looking for a safe place to cut through that bulkhead,” she told Creutz. “The autocannon are probably still our best bet for getting some kind of signal out, and I want Senior Chief Dierken and Gunner’s Mate Funk working on that as soon as we can get them in there.”

  She smiled tightly. “The two of them have had a free ride so far. They might as well start earning their pay.”

  * * *

  It took Travis twenty frustrating minutes to discover he couldn’t get to the tactical programs he needed. Either they weren’t accessible on the lounge computer or, more likely, weren’t available on a lowly Spacer Third Class’s password.

  Somewhere during that time, he noted peripherally, Yarrow gave up and wandered away. With his full attention on his search, Travis couldn’t remember afterward whether or not she’d said good-bye.

  But there was too much at stake for him to just admit defeat. If he couldn’t get to the program he needed, maybe Chief Craddock could. Closing down the terminal, he headed out of the lounge and up the lift. Unless the techs had already gotten the secondary analysis system up and running, Craddock should be in the gravitics monitor room, presiding over the operation.

  He’d exited the lift and was flying down the passageway when Lieutenant Lisa Donnelly emerged from a compartment directly into his line of motion. Her eyes widened as she saw Travis barreling toward her—

  “Look out!” Travis croaked. He grabbed for a handhold, missed, grabbed for another one, got it, and with a wrench that felt like it was dislocating his shoulder he braked to a stop.

  The whole incident had taken less than three seconds. Even so, Donnelly had enough time to switch from stunned surprise to full Angry Officer mode. “What the hell was that, Long?” she demanded, glaring at him.

  “I’m sorry, Ma’am,” Travis said hurriedly, trying to ease past her.

  “Ship blowing up from the stern forward?” she growled, moving to block his escape path. “Someone actually on fire?”

  “No, Ma’am,” Travis said between clenched teeth, his mental countdown ticking away the seconds. “I’m sorry—I need to get to Chief Craddock right away.”

  “So right away that you need to run people down?” Donnelly countered. “What’s the problem?”

  Travis squeezed his handhold. He’d hoped he could run the numbers before he actually mentioned this to anyone. But it was clear that Donnelly wasn’t going to let him go without getting something. “I think I may have a way to save both of the ships out there,” he told her. “Both crews, I mean. But I need—”

  “Whoa, whoa,” she interrupted, her eyes narrowing. “What do you know about the situation?”

  “I was fixing the monitors in CIC when Phobos’s wedge went down,” he explained. “If it was a hull harmonic—sorry, Ma’am. The point is that we need to get to her before there’s more damage.”

  “We also need to get to the miners before their air runs out.”

  “Yes, Ma’am, I know.”

  “And you have an idea of how we can do both?”

  Travis swallowed. In the back of his mind, Commander Bertinelli’s words rang with hollow mocking: Your job isn’t to think, Spacer Long. If modifications are called for, someone with more experience and authority than you will inform you of that fact. “Yes, Ma’am, I do,” he said. “But I need to run a tactical simulation to see if it’ll work, and I can’t get access to those programs. I’m hoping Chief Craddock can.”

  “Probably not,” Donnelly said, the anger in her eyes replaced with…something else. “But I can. Come on, let’s find a terminal.”

  * * *

  “Relieving you, Commander.”

  Metzger turned, frowning. Lieutenant Elmajian, the Assistant Tactical Officer, was floating behind her. “What?”

  “ATO’s taking back her watch, TO,” Bertinelli said from the captain’s side.

  Metzger felt a flicker of surprise. She’d almost forgotten she’d arrived mid-watch . “Yes, Sir,” she said. “Permission to stay until the situation is resolved?”

  “It’s resolved, TO,” Captain Davison said quietly. “As far as it can be.”

  “Get something to eat and then hit your rack,” Bertinelli added. “That’s an order.”

  Metzger sighed. But he was right. She’d already been late getting to sleep when the crisis hit the fan, and she could feel fatigue tugging at her eyelids. Maybe Elmajian, with fresher eyes and a fresher brain, could spot something she’d missed. “Yes, Sir.”

  A minute later she was heading aft down the passageway, wondering if she was more tired than she was hungry or vice versa. More tired, she decided.

  But if she went to sleep now, she’d just wake up in a couple of hours with a growling stomach. No, better to grab a snack first.

  Wondering distantly whether Phobos’s crew had had a chance for a final meal, she headed for the wardroom.

  * * *

  For a long minute Lieutenant Donnelly just stared at him. Travis braced himself—

  “You’re crazy, you know,” she said at last. “This can’t possibly work. Not without a huge slab of luck.”

  “I know,” Travis admitted. “But if there’s even a chance—”

  “No, no, I agree,” Donnelly said calmly. “Luckily for you, I’m as crazy as you are.” She tapped his arm and keyed the intercom. “Bridge; Missile Ops,” she announced.

  “Com,” a crisp voice came back.

  “This is Lieutenant Donnelly,” Donnelly identified herself. “I need to speak with Captain Davison.”

  “Captain’s busy,” Com said.

  “The XO, then.”

  “That’s who the Captain’s busy with,” Com told her. “And before you ask, the ATO’s part of the same deep conversation. Is there some crisis with the missiles?”

  “No, Sir,” Donnelly said. “I have a Spacer here with an idea about—”

  “You have a Spacer?” the other cut her off. “Yes, fine, thank you. Your call’s been logged, Lieutenant. The Captain will get back to you when he can.”

  There was a click, and the connection was broken.

  “Ma’am, we can’t wait that long,” Travis said urgently. “The deadline—”

  “Yes, yes, I know,” Donnelly said, still gazing at the computer display. “But there’s no way I can get to the Captain now. Not after I’ve already been told to wait.”

  “So we’re just going to give up?”

  “Hardly,” Donnelly said. “Remember how I got my telemetry subsystem fixed?”

  “You hijacked Spacer Marx and me?”

  “I cut through the clutter and went straight to the people who could do the job,” Donnelly corrected.

  Abruptly, she tapped his arm and launched herself toward the Missile Ops door. “Come on.”

  “Where are we going?” Travis asked as he hurried to catch up.

  “Com said the Captain was talking with the ATO,” Donnelly reminded him. “That implies that the TO wasn’t there. If she wasn’t there, she’s somewhere else. If she’s somewhere else, we can find her.”

  “Okay,” Travis said cautiously. “Where do we start?”

  “The wardroom,” Donnelly said. “Keep your fingers crossed that she’s there and not already asleep in her cabin.”

  She grabbed a handhold and gave herself an extra burst of speed. “Keep up, Travis,” she said over her shoulder. “And let me do the talking.”

  * * *

  “Commander Metzger?” The server peered around the wardroom. “Well, she was here. I guess she left.”

  “About how long ago?” Donnelly asked.

  The server shrugged.

  “I don’t know, Ma’am. Couple of minutes, maybe.”

  Travis clenched his hands into fists. A couple of minutes. Twice around the chrono. Two minutes that could mean the difference between life and death.

  Or maybe not. If Donnelly’s expression was anything to go by, she
was a long way from giving up.

  “Thank you,” she said to the server. She turned back toward the wardroom door, tapping Travis’s arm as she strode past him. “Come on.”

  “Where now, Ma’am?” Travis asked, a sudden horrible suspicion sliding in on top of his vision of dying spacers. Donnelly wasn’t planning on barging in on a senior officer in her own quarters, was she?

  “My quarters,” Donnelly said over her shoulder.

  Travis felt his eyes widen. Was she suggesting—? No. She couldn’t possibly—

  “We’re going to give the TO a call, and we need a quiet place to do it from,” Donnelly continued. “Move it—we’ve got lives to save.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  “Okay, that’s the last of them,” Creutz said, checking off an entry on his tablet.

  Ouvrard nodded, feeling a fresh flicker of guilt. The last of the survivors from Phobos’s aft section had been brought back aboard.

  And with that list of names, they now also had the complete list of those who hadn’t made it. Those who would never board a ship again.

  Phobos had lost forty-two of her crew in the first few minutes of the catastrophe. Forty-two out of a hundred and thirty: nearly a third of her entire complement. Most of them had been in the aft section of the ship, tending and monitoring the fusion plant or else working in the machine and electronics shops.

  Some of them had died quickly, in explosive decompression as their compartments were split open to space. Others had died even faster, incinerated in place as wrenched conduits spewed plasma the temperature of Manticore-A’s surface into cramped compartments or down narrow passageways.

  And it was Ouvrard’s fault. All of it.

  Because no matter how urgently MPARS Gryphon had wanted Phobos to be the first ship to arrive at Rafe’s Scavenger, their carefully-worded message had fallen far short of a direct order. An implied threat against her career, perhaps. But an order, no.

  Ouvrard could have ignored it. She could have kept her ship within safe acceleration parameters and arrived second behind Vanguard. The miners would be just as alive and safe, and in the grand scheme of the universe it didn’t matter a tinker’s damn who did the actual rescuing.

  At least, that was what the Board of Inquiry would probably say. It was certainly what Ouvrard would say if she was one of the officers sitting on that Board.

  But what was done was done. It was too late for bitter second thoughts about her decision; too early to worry about the Board she would eventually be facing. All that mattered right now was that two-thirds of her crew were still alive, and it was her responsibility to do everything in her power to make sure they stayed that way. There were injuries to be treated, trapped crew members still to free, the life-support systems to be monitored, and the communications equipment to be cobbled into some semblance of working order.

  Speaking of which—

  “Anything from Dierken about the autocannon?” she asked.

  “The shuttle was able to get him and his team in through one of the forward hatches,” Creutz said. “He’s going to see what he can do about a signal. He also wants permission to detach Funk and a couple of the others to see if they can get into the impeller room from that direction.”

  Ouvrard felt her stomach tighten. The silence from the impeller room implied that there were indeed no survivors.

  But miracles did sometimes happen. “Confirm to Dierken that Funk is to concentrate on getting to the impellers,” she told Creutz. “And get me an update on the team working on it from our side.”

  * * *

  For every second that Commander Metzger’s com went unanswered, Travis estimated that his blood pressure went up another ten millibars.

  Because, really, what the hell was he doing?

  He was a Spacer First Class, a mere gravitics tech. Metzger was a Commander, the Tactical Officer of an RMN battlecruiser. She had multiple years of experience stacked on top of multiple years of training. If she hadn’t come up with this idea herself, how good could it possibly be? What was Travis doing here, anyway?

  More to the point, what was he doing here?

  Surreptitiously, guiltily, he looked past Donnelly at the rest of the cabin. It was small, though considerably larger than his own living area, with two racks, two lockers, and the fold-down desk/swivel chair combo where Donnelly was currently seated. Somewhat to his surprise, the racks weren’t as tightly made as was required in the enlisted areas. There were also a few more personal touches in here than he’d expected: an intricate lace doily tacked to the front of one of the lockers, a small metal-mesh statuette on the shelf beside one of the racks, and a few small pictures fastened to the bulkhead at the head of the other rack. Travis wasn’t at the right angle to see the subject of any of the pictures, and he knew far better than to move to a better vantage point.

  For that matter, he knew far better than to move at all. This was officer country; more importantly, it was female officer country. An enlisted male shouldn’t be here at all—

  “Metzger.”

  Travis jerked, the movement nearly bouncing him away from the corner of the desk where he’d planted himself. On one level, he realized suddenly, he’d hoped the TO had already gone to sleep and wouldn’t answer. In fact, it might be better to pretend they’d gotten Metzger’s com by accident and forget the whole thing.

  But he wasn’t the one seated beside the intercom. Donnelly was.

  “Commander, this is Lieutenant Donnelly,” she said briskly. “I’m sorry to bother you, but I’ve just been offered an idea on how we might be able to save the miners and get to Phobos before she breaks up completely.”

  “Really,” Metzger said, her voice neutral. “Let’s hear it.”

  “Actually, Ma’am, the idea came from Spacer First Travis Long,” Donnelly said. “I think he should be the one to explain it.”

  Travis felt his eyes go wide. Donnelly had promised to do the talking. Now she was flipping on him?

  “Very well,” Metzger said. “Spacer Long?”

  Donnelly gestured Travis toward the microphone.

  “Go,” she ordered.

  Travis took a deep breath. People were going to die out there, he reminded himself firmly. If this could help save some of them, it would be worth it.

  “Yes, Ma’am,” Travis said. “Here it is…”

  He laid it out for her as quickly and concisely as he could. The fact that he’d already run through the explanation with Donnelly made it a bit easier. The fact that he was now talking to a much more senior officer made it a whole lot harder.

  But finally, with a minimum of stuttering, he made it to the end. Bracing himself, he waited for the TO’s inevitable scorn.

  To his slightly confused disbelief, the scorn didn’t come.

  “Interesting,” Metzger said instead. Her voice sounded distracted, as if she was only paying half attention to the conversation. Maybe that was why she hadn’t jumped down his throat yet. “A nice bit of outside-the-line thinking.”

  “Thank you, Ma’am,” Travis managed.

  “I’ve done a quick feasibility check, Ma’am,” Donnelly put in, rescuing him from the need to say anything else. “The numbers and geometry look good.”

  “Yes, I’m doing my own right now,” Metzger said.

  So that was what was holding the rest of her attention. Travis held his breath, wondering if the TO would find some flaw that neither he nor Donnelly had spotted.

  “Looks good,” Metzger said. “Looks very good. Excellent work, both of you. Stand by while I com the bridge.”

  There was a click— “Bridge; Metzger,” Metzger said. “I need to talk to the Captain.”

  Travis frowned. Stand by in com conversations usually meant being put on hold or muted out of the connection while a side conversation took place. Clearly, Metzger had missed hitting the proper key.

  Fortunately, it could be done at either end. He reached for the switch—

  And stopped as Donnelly caught his
hand.

  He started to speak, changed his mind as she flashed him a quick shake of her head. He nodded, and withdrew his hand. It was Metzger’s mistake, after all, not his or Donnelly’s.

  And actually, it would be gratifying to get to hear the Captain’s reaction to his idea.

  “This is the Captain,” Davison’s brisk voice came. “I thought you’d been sent off-duty, TO.”

  “I was, Sir,” Metzger said. “But I’ve just been handed an idea on how to rescue both Rafe’s Scavenger and Phobos, and I wanted to bring it to your attention at once. If we—”

  “A moment, TO,” Davison interrupted. “You were handed an idea?”

  “Yes, Sir, by one of our gravitics techs, Spacer First Class Long. If we—”

  “That’s Spacer Travis Long?”

  “Yes, Sir,” Metzger said, her tone going a little odd.

  “I see,” Davison said with a grunt. “Very well. Continue.”

  “Yes, Sir,” Metzger said. “Of the two ships in danger, Phobos is the most critical. If she’s indeed suffered a hull harmonic catastrophe, there could be extensive damage and substantial continued danger to any remaining crew. Furthermore, even if we assume significant casualties, there are likely more survivors there than on Rafe’s Scavenger.”

  “Are you suggesting we give up on Rafe’s Scavenger and change course for Phobos?” Davison asked ominously. “Leaving Rafe’s Scavenger to die?”

  “Leaving Rafe’s Scavenger, yes, Sir,” Metzger said. “But not to die. Once we’re on our new course we take one of Vanguard’s practice missiles, clear out the warhead space, and fill it with super-compressed oxygen tanks from our shuttles. Then, at the proper time, we fire the missile at Rafe’s Scavenger, with a cutoff timer set to kill the missile’s wedge at just the right moment.”

  “You must be joking, TO,” another voice—Commander Bertinelli—cut in. “That can’t possibly work.”

  “I believe it can, Sir,” Metzger said. “I’ve run the numbers and sent you the relevant plot. If we get the timing and vector right, the missile will end up at a zero-zero with them. All they need to do is go outside and bring in the tanks, and they’ll be able to hold out until we can collect Phobos’s crew and return to them.”